scubamagazine.net are spammers w/shady business practice Options

[echeng]

It appears that ScubaMagazine.net is spamming us here on Wetpixel by signing up as members who are clearly female (to entice our male-majority members) and spamming individual users via private messages.

Apologies for letting it through. We're taking action to make sure it's harder for people to do that.

And -- shame on scubamagazine.net for spamming. I'm going to make sure the entire online publishing dive community is aware of your actions. If anyone reading this is participating in the forums at scubamagazine.net, you may want to rethink your participation in a company who stoops to spamming.

For future reference, the two Wetpixel users who were spamming are "PhotoGirl" and "iDiveChick", both of whom came from ip address 65.111.169.35, which resolves to a machine at serverpronto.com.

[echeng]

I've also received confirmation from Stephen Whelan that scubamagazine.net is also spamming at deeperblue.net.

iDiveChick has accounts at digitaldiver, plankton forums, scubaboard, and more. At least we caught them early and put a stop to it here at Wetpixel. Scubaboard has banned them and has added "scubamagazine.net" as a "bad word" in the system. Wetpixel should post an automatic editor comment whenever an non-admin includes it in text as well.

[marinebio]

I've also received confirmation from Stephen Whelan that scubamagazine.net [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor] is also spamming at deeperblue.net.

iDiveChick has accounts at digitaldiver, plankton forums, scubaboard, and more. At least we caught them early and put a stop to it here at Wetpixel.

Thanks Eric, had iDiveChick post a few on the Plankton Forums and took care of "her." Bloody spammers... the ban list just keeps growing and growing....

[echeng]

It also looks like many of the images in iDiveChick's gallery on scubamagazine.net were stolen from other photographers. They are tagged "author unk".

[underwatercolour...]

Would it be catty for me to post some of my best blonde jokes at this point?

[jlyle]

It also looks like many of the images in iDiveChick's gallery on scubamagazine.net [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor] were stolen from other photographers. They are tagged "author unk".

A friend pointed out that some of idivechick's images were mine! To his/her credit, idivechick removed the images when confronted. The excuse was, "lots of people send me pictures!"

This post has been edited by jlyle: Jan 22 2007, 06:20 AM

[belizediversity]

idivechick is also on flickr, it's just one picture of a blond bird with a caption saying "Come say hello to me at http:www.scubamagazine.net [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor]". Pretty lame really.

[JackConnick]

idivechick is also on flickr, it's just one picture of a blond bird with a caption saying "Come say hello to me at http:www.scubamagazine.net [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor] [known spammer -editor]". Pretty lame really.

Yeah, spammed my cold water diving group. too.

Lame

Jack

[CADiver]

Wait, no one say anything positive here ...
At least I think iDivechick's protrait was cute Disagree ?

[james]

I think that's the idea CADiver...

[schford]

Same behaviours over with us @ RebreatherWorld - duly banned there as well.

Stuart

[Kelpfish]

Too bad she had to also hijack her own pic from Playboy....odds? Beard, nuts and vienna.

Joe

[Scubatooth]

well on another board theres a new member that makes me wonder if its not the same person. Im not trying to advertise but trying to get some info for the mods of the site

link to profile on other site
http://www.singledivers.com/surfaceinterva...p?showuser=3290

then if anyone knows where the avatar photo came from please send me a PM and let me know so i can contact the copyright holder and let them know of the violation.

Dan

[echeng]

well on another board theres a new member that makes me wonder if its not the same person. Im not trying to advertise but trying to get some info for the mods of the site

link to profile on other site
http://www.singledivers.com/surfaceinterva...p?showuser=3290

then if anyone knows where the avatar photo came from please send me a PM and let me know so i can contact the copyright holder and let them know of the violation.

Dan

Dan -- iDiveChick came from 65.111.169.35 (which has been banned on my site). Does the IP address match?

[underwatercolour...]

iDiveChick came from 65.111.169.35

I may be wrong, but this IP address is a proxy server used by ShadowSurf.com. I ran some tests with my own site's secure form and came up with the same IP over and over again. So whoever is doing this is making a deliberate effort to hide their real identity. If you Google "iDiveChick" it comes up on every board, forum, chat room, and message board imaginable. Looks like someone had a plan. I wonder what it was and who's behind it. Perhaps CDNN?

[echeng]

Bonnie - I think you are right. The ip address does go to a hosting company, and not an ISP. As long as any search for their product comes up with a bunch of discourse over how shady they are, we're doing our part.

Also google search yields a user who goes by "Finster," who apparently did the site integration work for scubamagazine.net ( he/she had to go to the vBulletin and PHP Post bulletin boards for coding help). A "finster" also appears on ScubaBoard.

[wagsy]

Here is what I came up with.

65.111.169.35 = Miami / Fort Lauderdale.

[map images removed by Eric]

[echeng]

Wags -- the point is that the ip address is probably one that belongs to a service that allows anonymous browsing. So you're going to hit the location where the server lives.

Not so useful... (I'm going to remove the images -- they're wide, and make this page layout awkward)

[bmyates]

idivechick not only had one of my photos (a bobtail squid with "Author unk", which she said she'd remove when I called her attention to it) on the scubamagazine website, but -- FAR more egregious IMO -- she is also SELLING that and one of my more recent photos FOR SALE on her Photobucket website!
http://s125.photobucket.com/albums/p...ror-shrimp.gif

That one is from my recent Indonesia Nov-Dec 2006 gallery: http://www.underwaterreflections.com/gallery/2275895

In both cases, she has the photos labeled as being taken by HER. I called her on it in this thread (which she, ironically, started to warn people not to use others' photos) on her website:
http://www.scubamagazine.net [known spammer -editor]/showthread.ph...sted=1#post1952

She was apologetic about the squid shot on that site, but hasn't responded yet to me finding the two on her Photobucket site. Pretty sleazy...

[TheRealDrew]

She was apologetic about the squid shot on that site, but hasn't responded yet to me finding the two on her Photobucket site. Pretty sleazy...

The link to the shrimp is down, but FWIW you can also try this.

http://photobucket.com/copyright.php